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Communicating Quaker experience to connect and deepen spiritual livesTue, 12 Dec 2017 19:56:04 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1119261658Writing Opp: Quakers and Healinghttps://www.friendsjournal.org/writing-opp-quakers-healing/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/writing-opp-quakers-healing/#respondFri, 08 Dec 2017 13:03:27 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028363Our April 2018 issue will look at Quakers healing. I’ve always been struck by the ambivalence of early Friends on the topic. The first generation went about the British and American countrysides like a band of newly reincarnated biblical apostles, healing people they met in miraculous ways. George Fox came across a man who had […]

This is the second installment of a new feature in which we ask you, our friendly readers, to help crowdsource future articles. We know there are plenty of Quakers who only need a little nudge to share their ideas with a wider audience. If you know anyone who should write about Quakers and healing, please share this with them!

Our April 2018 issue will look at Quakers healing. I’ve always been struck by the ambivalence of early Friends on the topic. The first generation went about the British and American countrysides like a band of newly reincarnated biblical apostles, healing people they met in miraculous ways. George Fox came across a man who had been had just been killed after falling off a horse in New Jersey and moved his head and neck about until he was brought back to life. This early enthusiasm turned to embarrassment pretty quickly, and many of these accounts of miracles were edited out of the published journals.

But this division between soberness and exuberance only continued. Many Friends pioneered advances in medicine, while others led the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement that communed with the dead. Nowadays, Quakers continue to span the healing arts from traditional medical careers to more spirit-based healers—and often find fascinating ways to combine the two. Friends in these pages have written about how their training in worshipful silence gave them unexpected tools when counseling hurt or dying patients.

Then there are so many types of healing—medical, spiritual, the healing of communities, the mending of a broken world. There’s a lot to talk about. Join the conversation and write something for us by January 8, 2018:

We’re always looking for new voices and perspectives from our community. Is there a side of the story you think isn’t being told or heard among Friends? Contact me with questions or ideas at martink@friendsjournal.org.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/writing-opp-quakers-healing/feed/03028363December Full Issue Accesshttps://www.friendsjournal.org/december-2017/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/december-2017/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 08:00:57 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028275FJ Members can download the full PDF of the December issue on Conflict and Controversy or read any article online. 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, […]

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]]>“I’m staying out of it.” Who among us has seen a difficult conflict and not thought or said just that?

All people are fundamentally equal, having each been granted and blessed with a measure of Light and the ability to connect with that of God within us and that of God within each other. And yet, in our world, power and privilege are most unequally distributed.

It’s impossible to speak productively about conflict without dealing with the power dynamics that underlie every conflict. For someone with all the privileges of the status quo, like me, that examination can be uncomfortable. A white-skinned, college-educated, professional, middle-class man like me quite regularly has the privilege of “staying out of it.” But most people in the world don’t—especially not women, those living with less material wealth, and people of color. Examining the power dynamics in most conflicts will reveal that when those with power and privilege remain on the sidelines, we perpetuate the status quo. We may find the Spirit in silent worship, but Quakers can wield silence and stillness as skillfully as a soldier might his weapon. That doesn’t mean we should.

As we put the finishing touches on this issue on the theme of “Conflict and Controversy,” my Friends Journal colleagues and I find it difficult to ignore the chorus of voices in our culture now speaking up against harassment by men in positions of power. While the stories we feature may not touch on this phenomenon directly, we hope reading them will be useful background as all of us navigate this world where, thankfully, many voices are speaking out with boldness and courage, voices which have been long silenced or ignored. A reckoning is underway, and with it comes the opportunity to hold difficult conversations and create a culture that is more just. What action will stir in us?

We must not imagine and engage in a sort of “Quaker exceptionalism.” Just because we’re Friends doesn’t make us immune to becoming, harboring, enabling, abetting, or turning a blind eye to abusers and harassers. We have every responsibility to be vigilant and valiant in naming and bringing into the Light, and into discussion, the conflicts we know are there. It is only in the Light and in the openness of dialogue and shared emotional labor that we can hope to progress toward being the seekers and “publishers” of truth that Friends have long styled ourselves to be. As the Friends who wrote “Challenging Conflicts in Our Meeting” found, tools and resources exist within our community to help us move forward, to process and resolve difficult dilemmas. We don’t have to be perfect, and we demonstrably won’t be perfect as we as imperfect human beings work through knotty human conflicts. But we do have to be willing to change and willing to place love for our neighbors at the center of all that we do, in order to be who we wish to be as a spiritual community. Let’s not “stay out of it.”

P.S. If it is your practice to give gifts to charity at year’s end, please consider Friends Journal in your generosity. Over half of our modest budget each year must come from donations by readers like you. Supporters like you are critical to our mission: to communicate Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives. Make a gift today at Friendsjournal.org/donate.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/quakers-privilege-conflict/feed/03028240The Obligations of a Quaker Science Teacher in a Post-fact Worldhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/science-post-fact/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/science-post-fact/#commentsFri, 01 Dec 2017 07:40:44 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028210Our pursuit of truth should be held in the Light.

Truth has been in the news a lot lately. The denial of science, the promulgation of “alternative facts,” and the casual branding of difficult truths as “fake news” have stretched our political discourse to the breaking point. The very question of what makes something “true” has been torn wide open, and people are taking sides as never before.

This question has challenged me to explore two essential layers of my identity, because I hold truth dear in each of them: I am both a Quaker and a science teacher. Age-old conflicts between science and religion have never played out within me. In fact, my life of faith and my life in science support and complement each other in comforting ways, and I cherish the truths revealed through each.

As a Quaker, I engage in the special acceptance of truth found in meeting for worship. With the gift of continuing revelation, Quakers wait in silence, confident that truth is always a hair’s breadth away. It may be very difficult to cross over into that amazing place where truth lives, but we know it is always there.

As a science teacher, I teach my students every day that truth of another kind exists nearby as well. The stories that science tells us, buoyed by evidence, bring us closer all the time to deep truths about our world. From why birds migrate to how gravity works, science is constantly trying to peek inside, getting closer and closer to how things really work.

I believe in both of these kinds of truth, and they comfortably live together in me without a hint of animosity. I have found a profound metaphor to describe what this cohabitation feels like. Denise Levertov, in her poem “Presence,” describes a distant and mysterious mountain “as if a red ground had been laid beneath not quite translucent white.”

She is invoking a painting technique in which an artist first paints a color on the canvas to give depth and support to the next color, which is painted on top of the first. A sky blue background in a Matisse still life, for example, lays on top of a surprising pink layer. Rothko’s paintings are towering celebrations of this practice, and each rectangle he paints vibrates and shines with multiple colors peeking out from under the surface.

My faith in divine truth is the “ground” beneath my daily work, where I go about my business as a science teacher. However, that business is harder today than it used to be, with science, and the teaching of science, coming under fire from increasingly organized groups of skeptics. Climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement are two particularly dangerous outcomes of this trend, and our health and safety are now truly at risk from this distrust of difficult truths.

The myth of “mad scientists” in white lab coats still pervades our schools.

The author studying photosynthesis with a student. Photo courtesy of the author.

I find that much of today’s mistrust of science stems from some broad misconceptions of what scientists do, so I spend much of my time with students challenging these misconceptions about how scientists view truth.

In our textbooks and in the media, science is often depicted as a system of beliefs that seeks to prove theories beyond doubt. The myth of “mad scientists” in white lab coats still pervades our schools. These eggheads—almost always white males—are imagined to follow a scientific method, elevating their theories to laws and moving on to hammer out new facts, working somewhere far removed from the general public.

A quick Google image search for “scientist” supports this, revealing hundreds of pictures of white men in white lab coats, staring intently at beakers full of colorful chemicals. These images leave out the vast array of science professions, not to mention egregiously underrepresenting women and people of color. Popular culture has a very narrow view of who scientists are and what they do, and more importantly, how they deal with truth.

Myths like this belie the very important essence of science. Scientists don’t deal in ironclad proof; they deal in evidence. Everything they do boils down to finding ways to support their claims, and then modifying, adapting, and even discarding, when necessary, what they thought they knew.

However, this commitment to the fluidity of knowledge and the willingness to adapt and change beliefs does not mean that scientific truths are flimsy. A common barb thrown at scientists is that they only deal in “theories,” and so nothing is certain. This is not the case. A “theory” for a scientist is true due to overwhelming evidence. If a theory holds up to repeated observations and tests, it is as true as it can be.

Scientists, then, hold their facts in a very stable place, where the evidence of their senses and their reason establish a kind of truth that is all the stronger because it is always open to revision. These truths only become more durable as evidence that would topple them fails to surface. It’s a fluid process, and one that requires reverence for nature and a respect for mysterious possibilities.

To illustrate this with my students, I like to point out that scientists and artists often operate from the same place. Entomologist and social scientist E.O. Wilson tells us: “The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper. Keep in mind that innovators in both literature and science are basically dreamers and storytellers.” Nature is not just the subject of a scientist’s study; it is her inspiration as well.

I can understand why it would be hard for people to accept the truths of science if we place religion and science on opposite ends of a spectrum. If we let people believe that science is dispassionate and devoid of reverence for the things it studies, then skepticism is a little more understandable. However, if we see that reverence for nature is at the center of a scientist’s work, the truths of science and religion appear to grow from some of the same seeds.

Quaker decision making isn’t compromise, or even a search for consensus. It is a humble acceptance that solutions to our problems are nearby…

I see some clear parallels to our Quaker business practices here. Our commitment to truth drives our collective decision making, from meeting for worship for the conduct of business to clearness committees. Collective discernment depends on the surety that truth underlies all of our interactions, just waiting for us to find it. Just as there is that of God in each of us, so are there abiding truths flowing from this divine nature.

Quaker decision making isn’t compromise, or even a search for consensus. It is a humble acceptance that solutions to our problems are nearby, in a realm of divine truth that we can all discover together if we search with reverence. Although our movement toward the truth is often imperfect, Friends frequently find that the truths discovered in this way withstand the test of time.

As a Quaker science teacher, I can’t help but place Friends foundation in continuing revelation and scientists’ openness to the unfolding truths of nature side by side in my life. These two pursuits of truth deal in very different kinds of evidence, to be sure. Hard data and repeated testing are more useful in the lab than in the meetinghouse, after all.

However, in spite of their differences, to me they still belong together. The truth I receive in worship by listening for the still, small voice within doesn’t replace my reason; it is a corollary to it. It is no less valid, and just as valuable as what I gain from sensory evidence.

For me, truth is a very rich word. If I know something to be true and can refer to it as a fact, it has to have passed through some narrow places in my mind and emerged all the stronger for it. Truth is a shimmering thing, both vulnerable and strong. And although I can arrive at truths in very different ways, every truth undergirds my world in the same way.

Outside of the classroom and in the meetinghouse in particular, I need to hold fast to the sanctity of truth.

Believing as I do in this richness of truth, it is all the more galling to witness political discourse in which the telling of untruths has become common currency. There are many roads to the truth, but simply labeling something “true” because we want to isn’t one of them. And calling an outright lie an “alternative fact” isn’t just morally wrong, it undermines the whole richness of human experience. And in that richness, we find people of faith and scientists, all believing in the sanctity of truth.

Believing this, I feel a call to action. In my classroom, I teach my students to examine their thinking and to revel in the times when they realize that they are wrong and, even more so, to embrace the times when they simply do not know. I teach them that truths are often hard won, but that when they see a truth clearly, to let it live inside them. My hope is that building these habits will help let the difficult truths in, and that the evidence for truths like climate change will find fertile ground to grow in.

Outside of the classroom and in the meetinghouse in particular, I need to hold fast to the sanctity of truth. We don’t really live in a “post-fact” world; we just have many more distractions on our journey. Our call to justice is being challenged more than ever today, and, as we seek to create a better world, let us not forget that our pursuit of truth also needs to be held in the Light. I believe that Quakers are and always have been “Friends of the Truth,” and just as we stand up for each other in a difficult world, we should stand up for our friend truth as well.

]]>Our meeting is moderately sized and was founded in the middle of the twentieth century. We’re in a college town, home of a major university and several other colleges. Our meeting attracts many academics and students, and could fairly be labeled middle class. The meeting owns its meetinghouse, and 30 to 50 people attend weekly meeting for worship. In short, it is a typical college town meeting. As such🔒

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The following humorous story from the Buddhist tradition suggests that not all spiritual practices originate from divine guidance or enlightenment.

When the Zen spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the kitten that lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the kitten be tied up during the evening practice. A year or so later, the teacher died, but the disciples continued the practice of tying up the cat during meditation sessions. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up.

Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

This story tells a deep truth about followers of religions becoming tangled up in trivia, giving certain practices a significance never intended by the originator.

The teacher who begins tying up the cat does so for a reason specific to the situation—i.e., the kitten’s playfulness is noisy and disturbs the monks’ meditation. Even a year later when the teacher dies, the cat is still young enough to be rambunctious, so the monks continue tying it up. By the time the cat grows old and dies, say 15 years later, the older monks seem to have forgotten exactly why they tied up the cat in the first place, but they associate it with their teacher; newer disciples only know that it’s the way things have always been done at the monastery. And meditation doesn’t seem quite right unless they have a cat tied up somewhere, so they bring in a new one to continue the tradition.

Because tying up the cat has no real significance other than keeping a particular cat from disturbing meditation, the teacher never writes or teaches anything about tying up a cat, so the practice gains a kind of mystery and assumes a significance never intended by its originator. After a few centuries, “learned descendants of the spiritual teacher” write scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

Our worship bears little resemblance to that of the original Friends. We have the original teaching and examples, but we also have several cats tied up.

Let’s apply this simple story to the practice of Quaker worship. In seventeenth-century England, Friends met in silence with no hired minister for specific reasons; for one thing, they were protesting the hand-in-glove relationship between the English state and the clergy. Meeting in silence without an official clergyman, or “hireling minister,” was a way to bypass a corrupt system and go directly to the Source itself. In a twenty-first-century democracy, care is taken to keep church and state separate, so a minister does not—cannot—represent the government. The original purpose of having worship without hired ministers is like the original purpose of having a rowdy kitten tied up: to address a specific situation that no longer exists.

At the time of the early Friends, only men who studied at Oxford or Cambridge could become ministers. George Fox taught that everyone has equal access to the Holy Spirit: no one has more than anyone else, and it was not necessary to attend a university in order to have access to the Divine. Early Friends meetings addressed this specific situation: a desire to show there was no need to follow a program laid out by seminary graduate or church liturgy. Instead, worship was to be “programmed” by the Holy Spirit, who could and did use anyone as ministers, even women, even children, even servants! (Most programmed Friends meetings today, however, prefer to hire seminary graduates, even of other denominations.)

Among contemporary Friends—both programmed and unprogrammed—our worship bears little resemblance to that of the original Friends. We have the original teaching and examples, but we also have several cats tied up.

Perhaps the most significant difference in our meetings for worship is the matter of theological unity. Early Friends all believed in the same Source (God) and used the same vocabulary to talk about it—Christian imagery and vocabulary from the Scriptures, all while acknowledging that other faiths speak in different languages about the same Source. Friends today have trouble worshiping together (in spite of the Quaker emphasis on the unity of Truth) because some Friends—in fact, some who most adamantly insist they are the only true Quakers—are offended by the words “God” and “Jesus.” Others, equally sure they are the only true Quakers, are offended by using “the Light” instead of Jesus Christ. “Tying up the cat” around language can make Friends fearful of speaking truthfully about spiritual matters and can inhibit ministry. In contrast, early Friends who spoke out of the silence could rely on their listeners hearing the Truth without having to define all their terms.

“Learned descendants” of George Fox and the early Friends have written “scholarly treatises” about the necessity of a speaker not preparing in advance, without taking into account that first Friends could recite long passages of the Bible from memory, which made them always prepared to speak of spiritual matters in ways contemporary Friends are not. Learned descendants of the early Friends write scholarly treatises that ignore the truth that we no longer read the Bible with fresh and personal insights, that our attention spans are shorter, and that the certainty of our faith is weaker.

We are all thieves, claiming their first-hand experience as our own.

Too often, Friends insist the only proper way to do Quaker worship is the way they think earlier Friends did, without being aware of (or acknowledging) specific purposes of earlier Friends that do not apply to current reality. We are all thieves, claiming their first-hand experience as our own, getting bogged down in the letter of their law, instead of seeking the spirit behind those laws.

I leave you with words from George Fox’s Letter 48, expressing a truth not tied to a specific situation or condition (there are no cats involved here):

Friends, to you all this is the Word of the Lord: take heed of judging one another. Judge not one another. . . . But every one of you in particular with the Light of Christ see yourselves, that self may be judged out with the Light in everyone. Now, all loving the Light . . . here all are in unity and no self-will can arise nor no mastery. . . . Dwelling all in the Light, which is unchangeable, you come to judge all the changeable ways and worships by that which comes from God. And with his Light . . . all those things are judged . . . dwelling in judgment thus, you will be filled full of mercy.

]]>I have suffered at the meetinghouse. There has been retribution for my faithful action, along with hypocrisy and denial. I hear the laments and regrets of many others, especially the young. We find ourselves on the outside of boundaries that we didn’t quite fully understand existed. The love of God and Friends seems very far away; it is a time of mourning and deep sadness and🔒

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An interview with Sa’ed Atshan

Sa’ed Atshan is a graduate of Ramallah Friends School in Palestine and a professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College. In October 2015, we published “Realizing Wholeness: Reflections from a Gay Palestinian Quaker,” and saw it become one of our most widely read articles of the year. Since then he’s headlined a plenary at the Friends General Conference Gathering and written for publications such as American Friends Service Committee’s Acting in Faith blog.

In person, Atshan is soft-spoken and gentle; he chooses his words with care and precision. He is generous in giving thoughtful compliments in conversations, and he seems able to find that of God in even the most obstinate political conflicts. It thus came as a surprise when he became the center of a controversy played out in the pages of Philadelphia newspapers this February. We talked to him to find out how a peace and conflict studies professor deals with controversy and to understand the discernment of a public Friend in the era of social media and instant outrage.

Do you have a short, just-the-facts kind of telling of what happened with your speaking invitation at Friends’ Central School?

Friends’ Central School in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, had a student group called Peace and Equality in Palestine, founded by a Jewish student. As part of the student group’s activities, they wanted to have a speaker.

The two teacher sponsors were both queer women of color, and they invited me to speak. I had never met either one of them. I was honored, and accepted. It was approved and confirmed, and we had scheduled it.

I was planning to give an uplifting talk, catered to a high school audience. And then two days before I was supposed to speak, I found out that the event had been canceled. It eventually came out that some parents had complained.

The students protested: 65 silently walked out of meeting for worship, along with their teachers. The teacher sponsors were called to meet at a diner off-campus the next morning at 7:00 a.m. and informed that the locks to their doors were changed and their email accounts shut down. They were not allowed back onto the campus.

All of this was covered in The Philadelphia Inquirer. I remained silent and didn’t engage the media at all. The Quaker world erupted, and Friends’ Central received many messages from concerned Quakers: How could a Quaker school uninvite a Quaker speaker, who’s a professor of peace studies at a Quaker college?

The school eventually apologized to me and re-invited me. I let them know that I couldn’t accept the re-invitation until the two teachers who invited me were reinstated. Instead the teachers were offered a $5,000 severance package in exchange for being silent about how they were treated. They declined that offer, and the teachers were then fired permanently.

Now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating Friends’ Central for discriminatory treatment of these teachers. It was at this point that I finally broke my silence and published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in which I expressed solidarity with the fired teachers.

When reached for comment, representatives from Friends’ Central School told Friends Journal: “While we understand that all individuals experience their own truth, we disagree with the fact pattern, including the timeframe, as described… Friends’ Central deeply regrets the failure of process that resulted in postponing our invitation to Sa’ed Atshan. It was never our intention to offend him. It was our intention to improve the quality of discussion of difficult topics, an important part of our mission in which we feel we are succeeding.” Friends’ Central declined to comment further on the personnel matter.
—Eds.

Tell us a little bit about the discernment that went into your public reaction. How did you decide initially to not talk? And then how did you change your mind and write the article for the newspaper?

I think one of the challenges that we face now—not just Quakers but mostly everyone, given the prevalence of social media—is the inclination to give in to knee-jerk impulses: to respond immediately whenever we feel that there’s been an injustice, whenever we feel hurt, whenever we feel pain, or whenever we feel offended.

Oftentimes, there’s an instinct—this rush—to take it to social media, to lambast the other party and publicly express one’s frustration. I really try as much as I can to be disciplined and to resist that urge. I think that going through a process of discernment—reflecting on what just happened, collecting all of the necessary information that one needs, speaking privately with key confidants, giving oneself some space and some time—can be really useful. It can allow us to engage much more productively and constructively.

I try as much as I can to be patient and not to rush to any particular mode of responding. And so that was the model that I adopted in this case. Self-discipline is especially important when it comes to airing our dirty laundry. I love Quakers, and I love being part of the Quaker community and the Quaker world.

This episode was very painful. It revealed some of the internal work that we Quakers have to do to deal with racism within our own community and to really think about who our institutions are accountable to. These are difficult conversations.

And to have some of these conversations happen outside of the Quaker world was difficult. Many people said that they used to have so much respect for Quakerism and they’d lost respect for Quakers now. I’ve had to explain that one institution doesn’t represent all Quakers. Like any faith-based community, we have our issues and struggles. You can’t write-off all Quakers based on just one episode.

So that was very painful for me, but I also had to deal with wanting to continue to represent Quakers and to communicate the beauty and value of all that we stand for. And in this instance, it was the teachers who embodied Quaker values and Quaker principles that we hold so dear.

Was there a process that you used to decide whether or not to publicly weigh in on the controversy?

I don’t want to portray myself as this selfless person, but it really wasn’t about myself. It was about the teachers. When it got to a point where my silence was being construed as equivocation instead of solidarity with the teachers, I knew I had to break my silence. They were the most vulnerable.

You know, I have a job. I have a wonderful job; I have benefits; I have a sense of stability and security. And in my position, I have tremendous support from Swarthmore College. I’m very blessed.

The teachers at Friends’ Central School don’t have a union. They don’t have a tenure track or a tenure system. They’re deeply vulnerable, as we saw. And so given that they experienced what they experienced as a result of inviting me to speak, I felt a moral responsibility. The least I could do was express that solidarity publicly.

This was an example of the tension between free speech versus controversial speech. How do you come down on balancing these?

My concern is the slippery slope. People may oppose the free speech of one party, and then all of a sudden find their own free speech violated. You’re now next on the list, you know? And we see that kind of boomerang effect. We see that time and again.

I truly do believe in the free marketplace of ideas. I believe that people have a conscience and a moral compass that can guide them. I don’t feel threatened at all by points of view that are different from mine.

Sometimes it is painful to hear hate speech. Time and again, we hear vitriolic homophobic speech that’s incredibly dehumanizing to LGBTQ people. And as a gay person, it’s very painful for me to hear that. But at the same time, I don’t think that the solution is somehow to muzzle those who speak in a dehumanizing way. I think the solution is to speak: How do we make a case that’s more compelling? How do we engage young people? How do we engage religious communities on these issues and get them to understand where we’re coming from?

And so I think that approach is much more sustainable and more enduring in the long run.

Even Friends can resort to stereotypes when it comes to our internal conflicts. How do we find our voice when we see someone being mischaracterized?

Stereotyping is very easy. As human beings, we need categories. We need them in our linguistic and conceptual toolbox. Using categories, it’s much easier to process the world around us and to communicate.

But sometimes we don’t realize the harm and the danger involved in associating people with a particular label. I see this in our relations with Friends United Meeting (FUM); in some situations, we just roll our eyes.

I have deep respect for the work of FUM. I’m a product of Ramallah Friends School, which has been supported by FUM since the 1800s. I am also frustrated with some of FUM’s policies, such as those restricting openly LGBTQ people from working as staff. But my critique doesn’t diminish my overall respect for FUM.

It’s easy for us in the world aligned with the more liberal Friends General Conference to stereotype everyone in the FUM world. We’re all fellow Quakers and have a lot that we can learn from each other. It’s problematic for us to just write-off an entire community and subpopulation of Quakers with one label—and a label that has all of these associations that we’ve attached to it.

It would be wonderful if we were more curious about each other and if we wanted to dig deeper beyond labels. We should be more willing to engage groups directly and ask them how they self-identify. What is their worldview? If we took the time to do this, we would see that the points of commonality are incredible.

It’s a clichéd observation that Friends will sometimes go out of our way to avoid conflict, even to the point of looking away from bullying behavior. How do we muster the courage to step up and be allies, even within our community?

Part of our Quaker heritage is speaking truth to power. Quakers have been at the forefront of many social justice struggles. Now Quakerism is morphing increasingly into a community of individuals who think that to be a pacifist, to see the light of God in every human being, and to be committed to our peace testimony requires us to actively avoid conflict and any form of confrontation. Confrontation or conflict is misconstrued as a form of violence.

That is disconcerting. In peace and conflict studies, we teach our students to embrace conflict. We teach our students that conflict is important and we should not avoid it. It’s the way we resolve our differences and address our misunderstandings or disagreements. But it’s important to raise conflict in a way that transforms it.

When instead we avoid conflict, we become passive aggressive, and the underlying issues continue to simmer. That can lead to violent conflict—or at least much more pain in the long run. So embracing conflict and learning to be comfortable with discomfort is a challenge facing Quakers. We have a lot of work to do in that regard.

Where do you find hope in the midst of conflict?

In this interview, we have focused a lot on the challenges that we face. There have been a number of critiques that have come up, and we addressed some incredibly sensitive, thorny, and difficult issues that don’t have easy answers.

First, thinking through these questions is part of a lifelong journey and will take experimentation, patience, and humility. I acknowledge that I have many more questions than answers.

Second, my spirit and soul are sustained by Quakers: the community that we forge and the relationships that we build. The egalitarian spaces that we strive to create and the love that we share with each other and with the world keeps us going in these challenging moments. I don’t want to take for granted the ordinary, everyday acts of kindness, compassion, love, and joy in the Quaker world.

It’s the moment when I’m sitting in Central Philadelphia Meeting on a Sunday and we’re at worship. Fifteen minutes before the closing of worship, the children and the Sunday school teacher are preparing to enter the worship space. They sing a song together to collect themselves and to alert us that they are entering. Just to hear them and then to see them come in—they add light and joy, and their energy just fills the room—makes my heart sing.

These special moments of Quakerism give me the strength and the willpower to renew the work that all of us do collectively. They renew my commitment to social justice work that comes from a place of love. It’s so easy for us to get caught up in polemical issues with their slogans and grand debates, but it’s important not to lose sight of these very ordinary acts we Quakers do that take on a really profound significance in the world we live in.

At the start I must enter a tunnel
Leading into a mystery.
With love and understanding
Nothing is hidden.
How can I regret my life—
I die of my joy in life.
Excited, I understand
It is peace coming to claim you.
I hear wings beating
And I will go
Forgive me Father
Whose language is the wind.You, write about love.
God knows
I put this on the page to make you listen.
Love, love, love.

Collection: Poems, 1934-1969, by David Ignatow

Note: A cento is a collage-like poem composed of verses taken from another author.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/into-a-mystery/feed/03028269Gracehttps://www.friendsjournal.org/grace/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/grace/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 07:10:11 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028272FJ Poetry: “Thank you for the words my father spoke before he died.” 🔒 Friends Journal Member? Sign in here! Not an FJ member? To read this piece, please join us today! For $28, you'll get: A year of Friends Journal delivered to your mailbox (11 issues) and email Full, instant access to the world’s largest online […]

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]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/grace/feed/03028272Let’s Grow Together Interview with Marjorie Herberthttps://www.friendsjournal.org/lets-grow-together-interview-marjorie-herbert/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/lets-grow-together-interview-marjorie-herbert/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 07:05:31 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028246Our Let’s Grow Together series profiles those who are newer to Friends.

]]>Marjorie Herbert became a member of the Society of Friends two years ago at the age of 77. She decided to join Kendal Meeting about a year after she and her husband, Walt, moved to the Quaker-founded Kendal at Longwood retirement community in Kennett Square, Pa., in 2014. Growing up in east Tennessee in a large family—“I had seven brothers and sisters”—she recalls religion being an early presence in her life, due to the promptings of her parents and her own curiosity with a spiritual life.

Marjorie and Walt both come from a Methodist background, and they met while attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the early 1960s. Later in life, after graduating and getting married, they became Presbyterians while living in Georgetown, Texas, “which is a pretty conservative little town,” says Margie. They started attending an “extremely liberal Presbyterian church,” and the pastor was a leader in social justice issues in nearby Austin. However, that church was marginalized by the larger Presbyterian organizational structure, and so was something of an outcast in the Presbyterian hierarchy. “When we came to Kendal, we thought the likelihood of finding another extremely unusual, liberal Presbyterian church was rather small.” So they immediately started attending meeting for worship at Kendal, which is unprogrammed.

While Margie eventually felt strongly led to join Kendal Meeting (after a process of reflection and discussion about commitment), Walt continues to hold membership in the liberal Presbyterian church, although he still attends worship every Sunday with Margie.

What were your early experiences of faith and religion?

My earliest exposure to religious experience was in a Nazarene church, which my mother took my siblings and me to. It was a small church, and I was fascinated by the intensity and passion with which people prayed and preached and sang. I think that I began to have trouble at a rather young age, because the description of being saved from your sins was something that I took very seriously, but I couldn’t figure out how it worked, how I was going to be saved from my countless sins and infractions as a young girl. I was about nine or ten years old at the time.

I began to question the stories that I was told in the Bible. Fortunately for me, my father didn’t attend that church, and my mother had promised him if he ever wanted to join a church that she would join him and bring the whole family. So when I was about 11 or 12, my father announced that he had found a men’s Bible study or class at a Methodist church in our community, and he thought he could become a Methodist. This was fortunate for me because becoming a Methodist ended up exposing me to, first of all, a more tolerant view of religious experience and, secondly, to church camps and to conferences of Methodist youth in which more sophisticated theological thinking was espoused. Also questioning was really encouraged.

I was very active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF), then went off to college and began to attend the Wesley Foundation. There I met a campus minister who would hold fireside chats for us to talk about faith experiences and faith questions, and he also had us reading some contemporary theologians. That opened my mind more to religious experience not being confined to a particular set of beliefs. But I think I received from that fundamentalist exposure the conviction, which I honestly have never wavered from or lost, that somehow at the core of our being is a spiritual life, and to attend to that life, for me, has been extremely important.

How did this new thinking influence your life after college?

I went from college to Union Theological Seminary in New York and got a bachelor’s degree in divinity—what the contemporary MDiv degree is now. I studied theology there and became very, very interested in possibly becoming a pastor. But being a woman and graduating in 1963 and not having stayed within the confines of a Methodist conference—and that’s a different story. It’s just that my Methodist pastors at my home church were very upset about my going to Union, which they thought was way too liberal and perhaps communist. So they did not report to my home conference, even though I had been a youth leader for many years in that conference. And because I was not reported as going to seminary, the conference took absolutely no professional responsibility for me.

I went off to seminary and had a wonderful time. I loved being there and did various fieldwork, but when I got out and tried to find a job, I didn’t have a home conference that identified me as a seminary student. I married and went to California and worked various odd jobs freelancing with an Oakland inner-city parish and the Pacific School of Religion. I was always a very active layperson in a congregation, but over the years my own social justice criticism of the churches—the traditional, mainline, Protestant church—and most especially of the theology that local churches espoused or didn’t explore in order to maintain a loyal base of believers and donors, made me feel increasingly alienated. And actually that’s what led me to become a Quaker: I’ve always believed in ongoing revelation. I’ve always believed that women were equal to men. I’ve always believed that consensus decision making is much healthier than hierarchical, top-down decisions. And I’ve always had an extremely keen and passionate interest in social justice.

What was your knowledge about Quakerism before moving to Kendal?

My daughter went to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and through a trip organized by Earlham I traveled with Quakers to the Middle East a number of years ago. I was astounded that the Quakers were talking to all sides of those very painful conflicts, and that commitment to listen and talk to all sides struck me as a more hopeful way of seeking social change. I was profoundly moved by the openness to the conflict instead of a polarization. There was a witness within that group of Quakers of hearing Palestinians and hearing rabbis and hearing bridge builders. It was the first experience I’d ever had of that.

But that was my first exposure to the way the Quakers worked internationally. When I was in college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I dated a Quaker from Philadelphia; he was the first Quaker I had ever met. And he took me to an Appalachian mining town to visit some Quakers who were working there. I met a young, married couple living in a tiny, little house in this very impoverished-looking little town, and I was profoundly moved to see the dedication of their lives to a structural issue. They were living a very different kind of life, and it was a kind of life that looked quite fascinating and appealing and frightening.

Years after that, when my daughter became engaged to a fellow Earlham student—he was a Quaker—we would sometimes go to Quaker meeting with them when they were visiting us in Georgetown, Texas. And then when we started visiting them in Massachusetts, we would go to Cambridge Meeting. So I’ve had some exposure to Quaker meetings, always unprogrammed. I tremendously like unprogrammed Quaker worship.

What is meeting for worship like for you now? What do you find in the silence?

I have been doing Buddhist meditation for almost ten years. All of my life I’ve had some form of a devotional spiritual practice, and it just came to where I could no longer feel it was a reality for me to quote “pray to a God.” The issue of prayer was something of a great crisis for me because I had always prayed. I had started looking into Buddhist meditation as a way simply to become quiet, and it has been a very, very helpful and fruitful spiritual practice for me. When I go into Quaker meeting, I do not do or attempt Buddhist meditation, but I have learned what it is like to be quiet. I believe that quietness is opening myself to the mystery of being, and that mystery of being is a place where I can be healed and receive guidance and develop compassion.

Occasionally but rarely, I’m led to say something with a devout hope that I am saying something that will nurture others as well as myself. But I love the quietness of a meeting. And I like the assumption that there’s not someone there who should be telling us what to think. Around 40 to 45 people attend meeting for worship at Kendal, and the average age might very well be 82 or 83 years old. So I’m sitting in the room with some people who have been lifelong Quakers. I’ve learned the term “weighty Quaker,” and I have profound respect for the lives that are reflected in that room. They have been lives of commitment and sacrifice and profound spiritual growth. There are people who have spent time in prison for civil disobedience. There are people who have been real leaders in social justice movements. There are people who are Hindu. There are people who are Buddhist. There are many, including myself, who are nontheist. And there are others who are theist and very profoundly Christ-centered.

Tell me more about your nontheist perspective in a Quaker context.

I go back and forth because I am so profoundly steeped in biblical material that I will say to myself, what does it mean there is that of God in all humans? For me, that means there is this spiritual reality—I referred to it earlier as the mystery of being. There is this hunger for meaning, this hunger for compassion and caring and community. And this hunger, if nurtured in the right way instead of abused and manipulated, can allow people to flourish into caring, sensitive people. A nontheist position for me means I do not think there is an extant spiritual reality apart from this energy that’s in all humans. And so I don’t pray to a quote “Father God”—that’s a term used among many fundamentalist Christians. I try to open myself and be quiet and wait. That opening and that waiting, for me, is the most nourishing and fruitful way I can worship.

Could you talk a little about your decision to apply for membership?

When we moved here, we really wanted to commit ourselves to life in this community and to find out what that meant. In my last years of life, I honestly feel led to serve this particular meeting. My desire to become a member was based on my tremendous feeling of being at home in unprogrammed worship and the concepts on which Quaker worship is based—that is, equality, continuing revelation, consensus decision making, concern for all human beings regardless of what they believe, think, or do. These attitudes that are fostered and encouraged are ones that I very much admire and want to hold.

What are your hopes for Quakerism in the future? Where do you think the growing edges are?

I don’t see a more important witness of Quakerism than through the educational institutions. I really feel that, through the kind of education that Quakers understand and can provide, people become—whether they become a Quaker or not—they become a more whole human being. I now live among many, many graduates of Swarthmore, Haverford, and Earlham; their education has made a huge difference in their lives. And so I really hope so much that supporting Quaker educational institutions is a major commitment.

The other thing is that I believe we have such a horribly polarized political atmosphere now, and organizations like Friends Committee on National Legislation offer a different approach. That to me is a tremendous source of hope: there are people who are quiet and compassionate and able to listen and able to build just enough basic mutual respect that something else can happen. I hope so much that, whether people are Quakers or not, they can be like Quakers and be agents of reconciliation.

]]>
Student Voices Project [in box, left column of p 5]
The fifth annual Student Voices Project is underway! This year we’re asking students to tell us a story about how one of the testimonies felt real to them in their life. As in past years, we welcome submissions from all middle school and high school students (Quaker and non-Quaker) at Friends schools, as well as from Quaker students in other educational venues, such as public schools and homeschooling.
2017-2018 SVP Theme: Testimony Stories
Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to communicate an idea, share an experience🔒

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]]>Most of the time, most of us live in what some call the real world—the sensed world filled with what we see, hear, think, and feel. Some of us move beyond the sensed world into what’s been called the spiritual realm, which cannot be sensed or measured. Those who recognize only the sensed world are known as humanists; non-believers; agnostics or atheists; believing in no God, no higher power, “No ideas but in things,” as Williams Carlos Williams once wrote. Those who do believe in a world beyond the senses speak of a spiritual world—or sometimes God’s other world🔒

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The Ministers and Elders Colloquium organized by What Canst Thou Say?, an independent Quaker journal published quarterly, took place October 6–9 at the Cenacle Retreat Center in Chicago, Ill.

Experienced ministers and elders were invited from a number of the branches of Quakerism, the diversity of which enriched the gathering. The two planners and one of the group leaders fell sick at the last minute. Other Friends stepped up at a few minutes’ notice. Colloquium participants marveled at the miracles and mischief of the Holy Spirit manifested among them.

Prior to the colloquium, participants were encouraged to read the book Inner Tenderings by Louise Wilson, especially chapter 11. Wilson was a presence throughout the colloquium. In the opening worship one Friend shared a heartfelt message saying the Society of Friends is in deep trouble because it is not surrendering to the Holy Spirit. Another Friend said Friends are planting seeds every day and leaving the harvest to God.

The schedule left Monday morning open, leaving space for the Holy Spirit. Saturday morning worship was extended in response to a Friend’s concern. Several Friends served as elders holding the gathering in the Light for an hour each morning before breakfast.

Paul Buckley spoke about “Restoring the Art of Eldering,” at its core: “see the Light, turn toward the Light, follow the Light.” Jennifer Elam tapped into participants’ creativity as they played with clay and then wrote impressions. Lucy Davenport spoke on “Laying Claim to our Calling” and Dan Davenport offered some resources and reflections on II Corinthians 12:1–10, followed by meeting in small groups to consider queries.

Fernando Freire facilitated a Spirit-led discussion of covenanting, after which participants broke into the same small groups to ponder passages from Jeremiah 31:31–34, Hebrews 8:6–13, and The Journal of George Fox on covenants, and talk of their own experience and the possibilities to form covenants from the colloquium. On Monday morning those small groups reported and participants discussed options for forming covenants among each other.

Evening sessions included an open mic with poetry, essays, stories, and songs, and interest groups were available on the second night. John Edminister led an interest group on “Searching Early Quaker Online Resources with the help of the Quaker Bible Index and the Digital Quaker Collection.” Paul Buckley led an interest group on early Friends. Mariellen Gilpin and Judy Lumb led an interest group on What Canst Thou Say? in which several themes were developed for future issues, along with volunteers to be guest editors for those issues.

All presentations and other reflections from participants will be published in the proceedings, which will be available on whatcanstthousay.org after January 1, 2018.

Quaker leaders part of church delegation to the Middle East

Two American Quaker leaders—Christie Duncan-Tessmer, general secretary of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and Diane Randall, executive secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation—participated in a ten-day trip to the Middle East in September organized by the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC), which has relationships with faith communities and organizations around the world.

Bishop Darin Moore, NCC board chair, and Jim Winkler, NCC president and general secretary, led the delegation, which, according to a NCC statement, “traveled to the region to mark the 50th anniversary of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian land, express solidarity with our ecumenical colleagues, witness for peace alongside interfaith partners, and observe current on-the-ground realities so as to better inform our ongoing advocacy.” The delegation of ten representatives of the NCC’s member churches included church leaders from a variety of faith traditions.

The trip began in Beirut, Lebanon, where participants met with people from the Middle East Council of Churches, including the general secretary, the staff for ecumenical relief, and the president of the board. Conversations were largely about the relationship between Christians and Muslims and the integral role religion plays in governance.

On September 10, the delegation began with early worship at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church near Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo, Egypt. This church was the target of an ISIS bombing last December. Following the service, the delegation met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and later with the Grand Mufti. The Grand Mufti is the highest official of religious law, interpreting texts and offering opinions on cases involving religious law.

The delegation also met with Bishop Thomas at the Holy See of the Pope of the Coptic Church. Bishop Thomas spoke with the delegates about the role of Christians in the world. The bishop said that the church left the evidence of the bombing consciously, to serve as a reminder of the victims of the bombing.

On September 14, the delegation met briefly with the Palestinian Authority Presidential Commission for Church Affairs. Later that day, Duncan-Tessmer and Randall left the main group to visit with Ramallah Friends School (RFS). The pair walked to the school from the Palestinian Authority headquarters. RFS is a Quaker school in Palestine that intentionally offers education to both boys and girls, and both Christian and Muslim students.

Duncan-Tessmer and Randall took leave of the main delegation a second time to visit the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Jerusalem. During the meeting, they discussed AFSC’s Israel and Gaza programs.

On the final day, the delegation visited the Palestinian city of Hebron, followed by a visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The day ended with a dinner with leaders of the region. At the dinner, the delegates discussed what they had witnessed and learned throughout the course of the trip, and began considering possible points of work for the National Council of Churches.

Adrian Moody. Courtesy of Friends United Meeting.

Appointment

In August, Adrian Moody began his position as head of Ramallah Friends School (RFS), succeeding Joyce Aljouny. Aljouny served as head of the school for 13 years, before joining American Friends Service Committee as the new general secretary in September. Ramallah Friends School, located in Palestine, is a ministry of Friends United Meeting.

Moody comes to RFS with an extensive background in international education, having served in school leadership positions in Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and India.

A committed Roman Catholic with a master’s degree in theology, Moody feels deeply called to the particular witness of a Friends school under occupation. As he shared with the school when he visited, “I am drawn to RFS for so many reasons. It has a long history of shared communities. It has a strong academic program and is able to offer its students wonderful opportunities. But RFS is not just a school—it is much more than that. I look at RFS and I see that the grace of God is working within your community. I see God carrying us all on a journey, together through moments of success and challenges which strengthens our lives and our bonds with each other and God.”

Moody, an Australian national, and his wife, Gillian, a New Zealander, took up residence in Ramallah at the beginning of August while their teenage daughter continues at boarding school in New Zealand.

Friends United Meeting invites all Friends to pray for Moody and his family during this transition and to give thanks that God has called him to witness to the transformational presence of Christ amid the Friends community in Ramallah at this time.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/young-friends-bookshelf-2017-12/feed/03028356First Day Storieshttps://www.friendsjournal.org/first-day-stories/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/first-day-stories/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:55:02 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028286FJ Review: “First Day Stories is a perfect lesson starter for First-day schools and an important book to have in every Quaker home with young children.”

I recommend this book for all First-day schools and Quaker families with young children. When I write a review, I usually make my recommendations at the end. I like to tell my readers what is good and important about a book before I recommend it. It feels heavy to start a review with “you must get this book.” This is especially true when reviewing for Friends Journal, in which my goal is to offer insights into books that represent Quaker testimonies or have some affinity with Quaker values. Of all the books I have reviewed over the past ten years for Friends Journal, this one gets my highest recommendation. First Day Stories is not a high adventure book offering deep insights. Instead, it is a gentle book with quiet simple practices that present Quaker life in form and content. Beyond its literary and artistic merits, this book speaks to that of God in me.

First Day Stories is a collection of 12 short stories about Quaker practices and beliefs for preschool children. Although the author recommends the book for three- to six-year-olds, my experience with the book makes me recommend it for a slightly younger audience. I read a few of the stories to some of the children in our First-day school at Brooklyn (N.Y.) Meeting and felt comfortable with the younger age group. Six-year-olds might be held by some of the longer stories.

The book describes a series of experiences of a Quaker family in their meeting such as shaking hands, holding someone in the Light, and participating in workdays. A few of the stories deal with emotional issues that are uncomfortable and demonstrate how Quaker practice can help children with feelings like loneliness or anger. Reading this book I, a practicing Quaker for more than 20 years, was reminded of the community built in sitting silently listening for God.

The book is creatively illustrated by the author using photographs of multicultural dolls acting out the scenes. The author uses over 15 dolls to make a complete Quaker community. The photos and characters in the stories represent the diversity of ages in a Quaker community from our youngest members to the oldest. Everything about the book speaks to integrity, simplicity, and inner peace. In one story, “Uncle’s Dog,” I was reminded of why we help others, how difficult that can be, and why we do it anyway.

Newman uses her more than 35 years of experience as a First-day school teacher to make her stories clear and short. After reading a story, there is enough time for another activity like a discussion or drawing to offer a complete lesson. At Brooklyn Meeting, I read the story “Holding in the Light,” which speaks to the Quaker practice of holding someone in the Light. During the discussion, a four-year-old asked to have his brother held in the Light. Newman describes her reason for creating First Day Stories as being aware that, “There are few materials for teaching young children about Friends’ worship and the life of the meeting.” Newman exceeds her goal by reaching children through stories that are simple, focused, and quiet. First Day Stories is a perfect lesson starter for First-day schools and an important book to have in every Quaker home with young children.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/first-day-stories/feed/03028286Fresh-Picked Poetry: A Day at the Farmers’ Markethttps://www.friendsjournal.org/fresh-picked-poetry-day-farmers-market/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/fresh-picked-poetry-day-farmers-market/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:50:12 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028292FJ Review: “Although the rhymes are easy, the poet Michelle Schaub has tossed in long and unusual words which will pique the interest of ages three to eight.”

Short, rhythmic poems celebrate the variety of treasures to be explored at a local urban farmers’ market from sunup to sundown. Although the rhymes are easy, the poet has tossed in long and unusual words which will pique the interest of ages three to eight: transformations, meticulous, impeccable, shish kebab, alchemy, Dalmatians, baklava.

The story, told in 17 poems, is revealed from the point of view of two children who share the day’s amusements while trying to keep their dogs out of trouble. The child-friendly market offers face painting and a dress-up trunk, motivating a poem, “Wild Dreams in Two Voices.” One voice, Green Zebra Tomato, and another, Dinosaur Kale, alternate reading in counterpoint with occasional lines read by both voices in unison. In “Necessary Mess,” there is a reminder that “No crops would grow without a lot of dirt.” “Local Loot” ends with “We find and eat our treasures on local market trips.”

Exuberant, action-filled illustrations cover the pages. Watercolor, graphite, and ink double-paged spreads follow the brown-skinned farmer’s son and his friend, a white city girl, through all the pages. A multiethnic crowd comes to shop, visit, listen to fiddle music, meet farmers, and enjoy lemonade. In “Delightful Bites,” the words waft all over the space as children and dogs sniff sweet flavors. At the end of the day, the farmer and his son pack up their truck. The girl and her mother are shown at their apartment admiring fresh purchases.

Farmers’ markets have been around since the 1600s in this country. They are on the rise in cities as people organize to abolish food deserts by supporting local, fresh farm-to-table efforts. When farmers have steady local markets, they can grow a greater variety of vegetables and fruits, using more environmentally sound farming practices. There is much for Quakers to like about this book for very young children. The themes of building community, trying and preparing new foods for healthy eating, and helping the environment come to mind. It would be easy to pair Fresh-Picked Poetry with more fanciful trickster tales with food themes, such as Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens, Stone Soup in any of its forms, or the story of cooperation in The Turnip by Jan Brett.

On the last page of Fresh-Picked Poetry the poet gives reasons to spend a day at the market. My own local market has a saying: “We are saving the world, one veggie at a time.”

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/fresh-picked-poetry-day-farmers-market/feed/03028292Maybe God Is Like That Toohttps://www.friendsjournal.org/grant-maybe-god-like-that-too/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/grant-maybe-god-like-that-too/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:45:46 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028299FJ Review: “Benjamin Schipper’s colorful, cartoon-like illustrations of big city life came as a welcome surprise, in contrast to the bucolic scenes I expected in a book about seeing God in the world.”

A boy who lives in an apartment with his grandmother asks her whether God lives in the city. He says he has never seen God. “You just need to know where to look,” she answers. Echoing the list of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23, she tells him that God is wherever there is patience, kindness, and goodness. God’s spirit, she says, is at work when we see faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The boy sees love when his grandmother hugs him and hands him his sack lunch at the start of the school day. He finds joy in the playground and peace reading in his classroom, patience when a teacher helps him with his tangled shoelaces, kindness in a doorman’s behavior toward a man using a wheelchair, goodness in a neighbor’s gift of bread, and faithfulness in his grandmother’s reliable presence as she cleans up after supper while he does his homework. There is gentleness in her manner at bedtime and self-control in his resolve to stay quiet after lights out.

The boy knows God experientially and describes God tentatively. “Maybe God is like that too” is his refrain. In the end, he decides, “Maybe I can be like that too.” There is nothing pat or didactic here.

Benjamin Schipper’s colorful, cartoon-like illustrations of big city life came as a welcome surprise, in contrast to the bucolic scenes I expected in a book about seeing God in the world. A child making his home with Grandma is another departure from the expected, but one that many readers will recognize as familiar.

I loved this book. I can imagine it having wide appeal in Quaker homes and First-day schools when questions arise about what people mean when they say “God.”

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/grant-maybe-god-like-that-too/feed/03028299When We Were Alonehttps://www.friendsjournal.org/when-we-were-alone/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/when-we-were-alone/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:42:31 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028303FJ Review: “As they spend time in the garden, the little girl asks her grandmother questions. All of the questions relate to the adult’s experiences at the Native American residential school she attended as a child. The information shared is age appropriate and would be an excellent way to introduce that topic to young children.”

This beautifully illustrated picture book is the story of a young Cree girl and her grandmother. As they spend time in the garden, the little girl asks her grandmother questions. All of the questions relate to the adult’s experiences at the Native American residential school she attended as a child. The information shared is age appropriate and would be an excellent way to introduce that topic to young children. It is a short book with little detail, but could easily be utilized in a discussion with an adult. The adult could ask the children how they would feel about being required to wear somber colors or not being allowed to use their native language. The discussion could also include the ways the children coped with a less than ideal situation. It is a Canadian book, but the topic of residential schools is relevant in both Canada and the United States. This is an excellent book for libraries, classrooms, and meetings.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/when-we-were-alone/feed/03028303The Girl Who Saved Yesterdayhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/girl-saved-yesterday/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/girl-saved-yesterday/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:40:43 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028306FJ Review: “Elements of it will resonate with anyone who has felt loss, and perhaps the message will be clear to children that we must not bury our sorrows and losses, but must remember and cherish them.”

A fable, or perhaps even a parable, The Girl Who Saved Yesterday is about the importance of remembering the Ancestors. Silence was raised by forest trees, but now she is told to return to the human village “to save Yesterday.” The villagers are hostile, and the mountain shoots out lightning like an eruption, and Silence realizes she must climb to the top and uncover the stones that represent the Ancestors. The villagers eventually join her and celebrate, with the love of the Ancestors joining them.

This is a beautiful book with richly colored, dramatic paintings and intense, poetic prose, but I wonder whether it is truly a book for children. Lester points out in his author’s note that this book comes from his own experience of loss as a child, and says this book “is also written for all the children who know someone who has joined the ancestors.” Elements of it will resonate with anyone who has felt loss, and perhaps the message will be clear to children that we must not bury our sorrows and losses, but must remember and cherish them. Nevertheless, I confess that much of the story left me baffled, and I suspect that many children will also be baffled. Part of the difficulty may be the language, which is dense with similes. Some are wonderfully imaginative, such as Lion’s roar so beautiful “that it turned into silver birds that took flight.” But what is a child to make of light like “bolts of lightning sharpened by hopelessness,” grass that grows “like tears of unseen sadness,” or a sun setting “like disappointment that would never be redeemed”?

I found myself puzzled also by some of the elements of plot and character. Why does Yesterday sicken trees? Why is it “Silence” that saves the memories if the message of the story is that we are not to remain silent? Do these details matter to the message or will they matter to children? Perhaps, as with any parable, we aren’t meant to analyze too closely or to dissect the elements. If that’s the case, then the book could be shared with anyone, from children as young as four or five, right through adults wrestling with difficult memories, and the glowing illustrations and message of reclaiming our past may resonate. However, I can’t help but suspect that most children will be confused. As such, it may be a valuable book to have available to share with a child in specific circumstances of loss, but I do not think it is particularly appropriate for use more broadly with First-day school classes.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/girl-saved-yesterday/feed/03028306Farmer Herman and the Flooding Barnhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/farmer-herman-flooding-barn/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/farmer-herman-flooding-barn/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:35:31 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028309FJ Review: “Farmer Herman and the Flooding Barn provides an engaging message and would be a welcome addition to a home, school, or meeting library.”

Farmer Herman and the Flooding Barn is a fine picture book telling the true story of many hands working together to provide a surprising solution to an imposing problem. An old proverb tells us that “many hands make light work,” and Weber’s story shows both the spirit of community effort and the spirit of creative problem solving to relocate Farmer Herman’s barn to higher ground to prevent flooding. In the spirit of community, the colorful artwork for the book was created by over 300 kids and adults. This creates a uniquely wide visual appeal but with a coherency provided by the coloring and shading of the abundant art by Kaylinn Strock.

The book also includes addenda directed more at adults or advanced readers that briefly describes the circumstance of the actual barn moving and includes a plea for support for foster children, their families, and potential foster families. The book was produced with the support of the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) and Broadstreet Publishing. Farmer Herman and the Flooding Barn provides an engaging message and would be a welcome addition to a home, school, or meeting library.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/farmer-herman-flooding-barn/feed/03028309Growing Peace: A Story of Farming, Music, and Religious Harmonyhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/growing-peace-story-farming-music-religious-harmony/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/growing-peace-story-farming-music-religious-harmony/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:30:25 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028312FJ Review: “This book would be a delightful addition to the library of every Quaker meeting where fair trade coffee is offered. Richard Sobol’s beautiful color photographs portray how coffee is grown and harvested by a diverse community in Uganda.”

The apt title of this charming picture book tells us what it is about. This book would be a delightful addition to the library of every Quaker meeting where fair trade coffee is offered. Richard Sobol’s beautiful color photographs portray how coffee is grown and harvested by a diverse community in Uganda. The Peace Kawomera Growers Co-op Society came to be as a direct result of the tragic attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers in 2001.

Sobol met the popular Ugandan musician J.J. Keki when J.J. was invited to teach at a summer camp in Western Massachusetts. At the end of the summer, J.J. toured a bit of the United States. He was emerging from the subway outside the World Trade Center at the very moment a plane hit one of the towers.

J.J. returned to Uganda in November 2001. He continued to work on his coffee farm in Namanyonyi where he also enjoys writing and playing music. This area of Uganda had suffered years of civil war and religious persecution. Naturally, J.J. could not stop thinking about his experience in New York City. He thought the attack was a result of religious intolerance and wondered why people of different religions could not live and work together in peace.

Namanyonyi has Christian, Muslim, and Jewish residents. Sobol gives the reader a concise history of the culture and explains how these religious communities came to be located in Uganda. J.J. wanted to create a way for people of different religions to live peacefully together. Although the children from these different spiritual communities played together, the adults remained separate.

J.J.’s music and his welcoming home are described as the central hub for the young people. The children do their homework at J.J.’s home, and he encourages their various spiritual paths. J.J. visited the parents and suggested they combine their individual coffee farms. Initially there was resistance. Each day as the children returned home from J.J.’s house, they sang one of his songs, “In Uganda, Everyone Grows Coffee.” The song became a mantra for peace, and in 2004 the coffee collective was formed. Today the Peace Kawomera (“Delicious Peace”) Cooperative Society ships 40 tons of raw coffee beans to the United States annually. It is refreshing to learn the backstory of the fair trade coffee we purchase and inspiring to read about the collective made up of Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

A glossary and pronunciation guide are included in the book. J.J. Keki’s music is available through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/growing-peace-story-farming-music-religious-harmony/feed/03028312Me and Marvin Gardenshttps://www.friendsjournal.org/me-and-marvin-gardens/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/me-and-marvin-gardens/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:25:45 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028315FJ Review: “It is the voice of Obe Devlin, the 11-year-old protagonist of Me and Marvin Gardens, at once passionate and possessive, fierce and tender, that suspends the reader’s credulity and leans him in to hear more.”

It is the voice of Obe Devlin, the 11-year-old protagonist of Me and Marvin Gardens, at once passionate and possessive, fierce and tender, that suspends the reader’s credulity and leans him in to hear more. Obe’s sense of possessiveness arises out of a profound loss which began over 100 years ago with Great-grandpa Devlin’s addiction to liquor, which was so total, so ruinous that, in family lore, he “drank dirt.” Left with a shrunken inheritance of a single farmhouse and a couple acres of scraggly woods with a creek running through them, both of Obe’s parents are plodding wage earners in the new service economy.

Obe’s mother still tolls the dinner bell that used to resound over a lordly 175 acres to call in Obe and his older sister, Bernadette, to the last ritual of Devlin unity: prayers around the family dinner table over a home-cooked meal. Conversations over that dinner table signal a largely empty feast: querulous, resentful, at last full of confusion from that century-old loss still resonating weakly but dispiritingly. Obe, on the other hand, full of some remnant fierceness that Great-grandpa Devlin knew only to drink with, is lit and lightened with an almost physical knowledge of that loss.

Obe is a loner who spends most of his time crossing boundaries in school and around home to get to those scraggly woods and the feeble length of Devlin Creek—running mostly with construction debris from an upstream development of “spacious new homes” that is eating up the last of Great-grandpa Devlin’s patrimony. Fatefully, Obe is a Devlin who hears voices and sees with a second sight, signals which don’t simply torment and caution, but enable and direct.

The voice of Ms. G, Obe’s science teacher extraordinaire, puts into perspective the wastefulness of the contemporary world economy by sounding periodic alarms and counseling action. It was Ms. G who started the now legendary collection of one million soda can pull tabs, initiating her class of restless seventh graders to rescue a fraction of their neighborhood and sound a tocsin wider, deeper, and oddly more hopeful than the doleful Devlin dinner bell.

Annie, a fellow seventh grader, is another persistent, precocious voice in Obe’s ear. A budding geologist, Annie picks up rocks, both on and off Devlin land, to hold them warm in her palm and read their still pulsing bulletins.

Some of the things Obe sees by Devlin Creek are beyond description in a review; likewise the voices of multi-dimensional characters—such as science mentor Ms. G and school-bus buddy, fellow rambler Annie—can only be hinted at in cold prose. But Obe’s voice is so alive with nuance, so capacious, so possessed by that nowhere-to-go-but-up, hundred-year-old sensibility that suspending disbelief we believe.

And it’s about time we all sat down by Devlin Creek, that pitiful marker of loss and pointer to our common future.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/me-and-marvin-gardens/feed/03028315Making It Right: Building Peace, Settling Conflicthttps://www.friendsjournal.org/making-right-building-peace-settling-conflict/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/making-right-building-peace-settling-conflict/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:20:22 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028318FJ Review: “Making It Right is a very practical book on everyday peacemaking for children and teens. It wouldn’t hurt adults to read it, too.”

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” —Nelson Mandela

Making It Right is a very practical book on everyday peacemaking for children and teens. It wouldn’t hurt adults to read it, too. Canadian author Marilee Peters tells real-life stories of injury, damage, and anger becoming stories of listening, reparation, cooperation, and friendship. Along the way, she shows the steps of restorative justice with easy-to-understand examples from diverse cultures around the world, including a community of chimpanzees.

She tells us the major shortcomings of many criminal justice systems and offers a grassroots problem-solving method that can help people avoid juvenile detention and jail while learning how to take responsibility for working things out. The role of mediator is clearly shown as instrumental in reaching agreements that settle conflicts. The net effect is empowering the victims, the perpetrators, the bystanders, and the community.

Making It Right is on our recommended reading list for teachers of every grade level and for students in fourth to ninth grades. Parents will find it helpful as it offers alternatives to punishment and works toward developing empathy and responsibility. Facilitators in the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) and other similar projects will find stories their participants can relate to.

]]>https://www.friendsjournal.org/making-right-building-peace-settling-conflict/feed/03028318Answering the Cry for Freedomhttps://www.friendsjournal.org/answering-cry-freedom/
https://www.friendsjournal.org/answering-cry-freedom/#respondFri, 01 Dec 2017 06:15:10 +0000https://www.friendsjournal.org/?p=3028322FJ Review: “It tells stories of flawed human beings, living in a different time and place, with both passion and compassion. The publisher identifies it as written for nine- to twelve-year-olds, but I loved it.”

I’m writing this just after the Fourth of July, which has put me in mind of all the books I read as a boy on the American Revolution. They were stories of courageous heroes fighting for freedom. Nearly all were white (Crispus Attucks was the exception) and male (women were relegated to support roles for their husbands, brothers, and fathers). They were patriotic stories of manly fighters and fearless statesmen, and I loved it.

Answering the Cry for Freedom tells the stories of 13 African American men and women, slave and free, who lived in revolutionary times. These are also stories of courageous fighters, but they were fighting for a freedom that my childhood books rarely (if ever) recognized. Some of the same characters show up, but they fill very different roles. George Washington appears several times—mostly as a slaveholder—and Martha Washington as a woman aggrieved when a favored slave, Ona Judge, walks out of servitude. Thomas Jefferson is portrayed as taking advantage of an underage slave and barely acknowledging the children she bore. Among the white male heroes of my youth, only two foreigners, the Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Kościuszko, really fare well. In this book, British generals and governors more often fill the roles of heroes who treated the African Americans under their protection fairly.

Even so, Answering the Cry for Freedom doesn’t just villainize some in order to build up others. It tells stories of flawed human beings, living in a different time and place, with both passion and compassion. The publisher identifies it as written for nine- to twelve-year-olds, but I loved it. It provides needed balance to the stories I read 50 or 60 years ago and introduces new American heroes. I think it would be wonderful to read in and discussed by a multigenerational group.

As a Quaker, I had another reaction to this book. Paul Cuffe (one of the 13 people profiled) was a committed member of the Religious Society of Friends. While he is described as a “deeply religious man,” the influence of his Quaker faith is only discussed briefly. Similarly, the chapter on Jarena Lee has a tangential mention of Quakers. Beyond these brief references, Quakers are absent. We prize our history as abolitionists and the fact that we took a corporate stand against the slave system long before any other denomination. And yet, Quakers play a very small part in the lives depicted.

Instead, nearly every chapter in this book reveals deep and enduring attachments to the Methodist Church—even in the chapter on Richard Allen who founded the first African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1787, Allen protested segregation in worship and racial restrictions on preaching by leading a mass withdrawal of African American members from St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Pa. They turned their backs on the Methodist Church, but not Methodism. More than a half-century later, white Methodists had still not taken a corporate stand against slavery. Their church split over the issue in the 1840s. I have to ask: why they didn’t turn to their allies, the Friends?

I think the answer is one that today’s Friends need to ponder. Quakers worked to free their bodies, but Methodists worked to feed their souls.